Factsheet

Description

She Remembered Caterpillars is a fungipunk fantasy about love, loss, and holding on, told in the format of a colour-based puzzle game. A tale as the bond between parent and child, this lush and bewildering title will have players testing their wits against a variety of challenges, some devious, and others outright nefarious, but all beautiful and very, very strange.

History

2012 — 2013

From a test project to learn the basics of coding in unity the game evolved into an experiment in manipulating the physic-layers of objects. Characters of a specific color were able to move through walls of the matching color. The game's system was then extended to cover the logics of basic color theory: Purple characters now could move through purple, red and blue walls. Consequently, the ability to split and combine characters (mixing colours) was introduced.
As it was not clear for David where he was heading he implemented a large amount of additional mechanics into the game, including characters being shot with a cannon. He continued to work on the project mostly as a platformer (with puzzle elements) but discarded the more action-oriented aspects of the game over time and ended up with a large number of colour-based mechanics which required some serious filtering and polish.
In late 2013 David pitched a prototype, then named "Spectrum" to Black Pants Game Studio while they were not able to help him finish the game they introduced him to Daniel Goffin who had just released Symmetrain on iOS.

2014 – 2016

David and Daniel worked on a prototype that could be presented to publishers at the IGF 2014 in San Francisco. They were lucky and met Ysbryd Games. In August 2014 David and Daniel founded and then signed a publishing contract with Ysbryd Games. Since September 2014 the two have been working on the project full-time. After showing a new prototype at AMAZE FEST 2015 in Berlin Daniel decided to change the aesthetic of the game from 3D to hand-drawn 2D but it wasn't until late 2015 until a final fitting style was settled on.
In the meantime Cassandra Khaw joined the team as a writer. Her initial approach was retelling the Isis and Osiris myth through as post-apocalyptic fungipunk tale. A myth about life, and death, and then life again. However, a few months later her father died and the story was rewritten. Instead she wanted to talk about grief and about bereavement and losing your parents: deaths are inevitable in everyone’s lives.
Exhibiting the game at EGX, PAX and gamescom made it clear to the team that a large part of their customer base might be families. Consequently the story was adapted somewhat without losing the main focus. The hope is that the game might serve as a platform that enables a discourse between children and parents about life, illness, and death.